The Hanvon WISEreader C920 9.7″ Color E Ink eReader

The Jetbook Color isn’t the only color E Ink ereader. The same company that makes the hardware for it also has their own model that uses the same color E Ink Triton display.

It is called the Hanvon WISEreader C920. Its design appears to be very similar to that of the JetBook Color but it is black instead of white, and looks to have more of an ebook-oriented software, whereas the JetBook is designed for the education sector and comes with software designed for students and teachers.

Plus the Hanvon WISEreader C920 has a touchscreen that works with both your fingers and a stylus, whereas the JetBook Color supports stylus touch input only.

Back in November 2010, Hanvon announced that they would be the first company to release a color E Ink ereader. It was supposed to be released in China in March 2011, but that never happened.

At some point they released a similar model, the Hanvon WISEreader E920, with a black-and-white screen, not color. It uses the same 9.7″ 1600 x 1200 resolution E Ink screen, though. And appears to have all the same features as the color model, the C920.

But as far as I can tell, the color Hanvon WISEreader C920 hasn’t been released yet, not even in China. It’s listed on Hanvon’s website, but internet searches turn up nothing from any retailers, just the E920. I wonder if Hanvon plans to release the C920 in the US—it says it has an English menu interface—or if they just plan to make the hardware for other companies like they did with Ectaco and the JetBook Color.

Hopefully the Hanvon WISEreader C920 will make an appearance at some point, if even in Asia. Right now it’s not clear what Hanvon intends to do with it.

11 Responses to “The Hanvon WISEreader C920 9.7″ Color E Ink eReader”

1600×1200 is a VERY impressive screen resolution. Stepping up to that from a Nook Color, Nook Tablet, or Kindle Fire would be a much more dramatic improvement in quality than you get when you step from ordinary 480p video to 720p HD video.

You’d be getting TWICE AS MANY scan lines as you get on a Kindle Fire or a Nook Color or Nook Tablet! Most laptop and desktop PCs don’t even have that resolution. It would be like a photograph.

Let me add a comment about the 1600 by 1200 screen, that’s what I’ve been living with for the past 6 years on my ThinkPad T43p. It’s sharp, but not quite picture quality. The default size fonts will look smaller, but sharper and what’s great is you can display two 8 1/2 by 11 inch pages side by side and read them (in landscape mode of course). My original expectation was to be able to read off of the screen, but the back lighting does take a toll on your eyes. 1600 by 1200 resolution in an e-ink screen (even in black and white) could be a real game changer, depending on how it’s implemented.

The issue is that it is 1600×1200 B&W. With the color filter in place it is effectively an 800×600 screen. At that size, it is probably not going to look all that great. Throw in the fact that the color filter is also going to reduce contrast, probably by anything from about a third up to 3/4s depending on how it is implemented…and you have something significantly worse than what the native 1600×1200 eink panel under the filter would look like.

Until eink has improved a lot more than it already is, adding a color filter is going to make a decent display worse. Once you have an amazing display, then a color filter taking it down a notch or two isn’t that bad…but decent down a notch or two is no longer a decent display IMHO.

Hello,
Thanks for the great work on the blog.
Amazon UK has the E920 on sale (1 ex) for £387 (ouch !) but I have no idea as to its actual performance in terms of page turn speed, PDF annotation, etc. Any ideas or do I go for the Onyx M92 ?
All the best
Simon